Beach Life
Virtual Resort: Spring Break
What is it?
There is a definite parallel between playing Street Wars and playing Beach Life (or Virtual Resort: Spring Break, as it is known in the United States): You can have a lot of fun with either game, but you have to play along; you have to go with the flow of the game, never trying to force your will upon it. Then you will find space enough to do more or less exactly what you want.
In Beach Life, you manage a holiday resort. You start out with at least a hotel, a construction yard, a complaints office, and a power generator. You have to build restaurants, discos, amusement halls, hire lifeguards, security, cleaning personnel, to keep your guests amused and safe. Some of the attractions appeal more to men, others more to women. It is important that you keep the sexes balanced.
Beach Life comes with twelve maps. They are all supposed to be
part of the same archipelago, which accounts for the identical flora.
Five of them are part of larger islands, and the guests arrive by bus
(a lovely, 50s-style bus, BTW). The others are small islands, and the
guests arrive by boat. Each map has its own weather, hazards, and
difficulty setting. Easy means guests will hardly ever complain about
prizes, but you have only few buildings available. Common hazards are
sharks and a poor water supply. For each map there is a mission with
clearly defined goals and a time limit. If you succeed, you can
continue playing, and the map becomes available in sandbox mode,
a sort of freeform play.
There are annoyances. One is the odd shape of the buildings, and the way the game handles them. Buildings in Beach Life are rarely ever exactly rectangular, there are always some tiles missing, they are far larger than buildings in similar games (in Emperor, the 5×5 mill was already one of the largest buildings; the restaurant in Beach Life is something like 15×15), and they automatically have one tile of road around them. The road tiles of two neighboring buildings can overlap. This is in itself not a bad idea, but it is very hard to predict if a building will fit into an empty space or not, especially since there is no way to make the game display a grid.
If you have misplaced a house, there is no immediate remedy. You have to build it; then, when it is finished, you can sell it again. Your workers will then dismantle the building, and you will get back part of the original price. Of course, dismantling can be done only during your builders' work hours, so a misplaced building may cost you quite some time.
Once finished, the buildings start to disintegrate ridiculously fast. A mechanics shack should be one of the first things you build. And no matter how many mechanics I hired, I could never get them to inspect the houses properly, I had to check them myself regularily and call a mechanic when needed (having the toilets cleaned is a similar problem). If a building is in poor condition, guests will refuse to use it. If the power generator gets in bad shape (it tends to do so right at the beginning), it will produce less energy.
Character animations are the best I have ever seen in any game. To watch one of your guests sit down at a restaurant table is impressive. She will pull the chair away from the table, sit down pulling it forward again, and once seated, slide it towards the table a bit more. That is exactly how you do it, but you are usually not aware of it. These detailed animations are an important part of the game: it's simply fun to watch these critters in their activities.
Technically, there is not much to say about the game. I encountered no bugs, but did notice that the game is a resource hog. The Sempron 3000+ I played it has more than three times the speed of the recommended system, yet when I alt-tabbed out of the game to save a screenshot as a PNG, that took quite some time (the zip compression PNG uses is of course quite processor intensive). Eidos warns us not to keep any programs running in the background and never to alt-tab out of the game, but there were no problems except that any open windows were resized when I did so. The built-in screenshot capture is fairly useless and just a product placement deal with Olympus (you will encounter some Olympus billboards within the game, too).
As I said before, if you play this game, go with the flow. When you play a mission, concentrate on the objects of the mission and ignore the rest, if you can. Save once you have succeeded, you can always play from there. I recommend that you play through the missions, even though there is a cheat eliminating the need to. They have some neat features you don't get in sandbox play, they are a good way to learn to know the game, they give inspirations, and you see some things you might not see otherwise. If you play the game well, you would never see a whole resort on the rampage. You do in one mission.
It's not that I like this design philosophy very much. I would have preferred had the designers concentrated on good open gameplay and had either omitted missions completely (as in SimTower) or given you the means to create your own. But the point is not what might have been. The game now is as it is. You can either take it or leave it. Seeing how much fun it can be, I suggest you take it.
For every scenario (both mission and sandbox) there is a
.pis file in its subfolder (under Data/Scenario).
This is a text file that can be edited. One of the easiest things
to do is to unlock all the buildings in the earlier maps: just copy
the Valid Buildings
part over from SandScenario12.pis.
Another easy, but pointless thing would be to use the path tiles from
another map.
You can probably do other things too, like change the weather or
hazards. Be sure to back up and experiment.
You will find many cheats for Beach Life floating around on the web. Two or three of them actually work:
